Hurel Corporation announced that the results of toxicological evaluations performed on HµrelStaticDog™, Hurel’s new, patent-pending method of culturing actual liver cells from the canine (dog) species, will be highlighted as a part of UCB’s keynote overview of the current state of the art of in vitro models to use in early toxicology assessment to detect human hepatotoxic drugs. The UCB presentation will take place at ADME and Predictive Toxicology 2013, the toxicology symposium to be held in Barcelona, Spain on April 11th at 2:15PM.

The study results derived from HµrelStaticDog™ represent a culmination of a multi-year collaboration between UCB and Hurel under which this new pre-clinical analytic tool was developed. UCB funded the development of HurelStaticDog™ and has collaborated with Hurel in its characterization and validation testing.

Dr. Leslie Z. Benet, Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and Head of Hurel’s Scientific Advisory Board, said in connection with the upcoming presentation: “The HµrelStaticDog™ pre-clinical tool represents an important milestone in the evolution of the drug development process, for two reasons. First, as the R&D collaboration data that will be presented in Barcelona shows, HµrelStaticDog™ is a powerful new in vitro tool for predicting the potential toxicity of drugs in humans well before the clinical trial stage. And second, because regulatory agencies, such as the FDA and EMA, require testing of every new drug candidate on at least one non-human, “large animal” species such as dog, HµrelStaticDog™ represents a critically important new in vitro, cell-based vehicle for predicting the outcome of animal tests conducted in dogs. That ability to predict in vivo outcomes in dogs by in vitro testing on HµrelStaticDog™ may be expected to improve the efficient performance of animal testing and thereby help reduce the over-all number of animal tests performed, while also contributing to a reduction in the rate of late-stage failures in human clinical trials.”

HµrelStaticDog™ constitutes the first instance of an advanced, high-functioning, in vitro liver cell culture system comprised of actual living cells from the canine species, which is characterized for use in pre-clinical research activities. HµrelStaticDog™ is expected to find application in the evaluation of the safety (i.e., toxicological) risks of prospective drug candidates, as well as of the metabolic and other pharmacokinetic properties of those drug candidates.